ekaplan's blog

Creating Home Together is a project led by Sistering with organizations across Canada. Together, we created a new housing development process that addresses the unique needs of women (cis and trans) and gender-diverse people experiencing homelessness with the goal of improving their lives. 

Goals:

We had several long-term and short-term goals that kept us on track throughout this project. The main goal is the desire to create more inclusive, affordable, and suitable housing opportunities for women and gender-diverse people in Canada.

Indigenous homelessness in Canada has persisted for over 200 years, yet little has been done to remedy the issue. Housing conditions among First Nations peoples have been extensively documented for years as falling far below the standards of broader Canadian society.

I have begun to write an open-access interdisciplinary textbook entitled "Introduction to homelessness in high-income countries: An open access e-textbook". It aims to provide an introduction to homelessness for students, service providers, researchers, and advocates.

Transdisciplinary approaches challenge us to think about how to work together to build effective support structures to prevent and end homelessness. This blog will discuss how research and practice in homelessness services can be brought together.

It should come as no surprise that a person’s racial and ethnic identity affects their lived experiences in various ways, including shaping their socioeconomic, health, and safety outcomes. In major Canadian metropolitan centers like Toronto and Vancouver, this is evident in the overrepresentation of racialized individuals within the cities’ homeless populations. However, the relationship between homelessness and environmental racism in Canada is less obvious. 

Manitoba shelters are failing to meet the needs of transgender people. Many transgender people experiencing homelessness face barriers, discrimination, and stigma when accessing shelters or transitional housing programs. However, we believe that there are strategies that could help make transgender people experiencing homelessness feel safer and more comfortable when accessing shelters throughout the province.

Today is International Overdose Awareness Day, a day to raise awareness of and reduce the stigma of drug-related deaths.

Canada’s National Housing Strategy establishes “the right of every Canadian to access adequate housing”. Despite the establishment of this strategy, housing-related challenges are growing and the realization of the right to housing is far from reality for many. According to Statistics Canada:

We recently released the latest report in our series on the scale and severity of household food insecurity in Canada. After six PROOF reports, the story remains the same — food insecurity is a large problem that hasn’t gotten any better. This blog provides an overview of the findings highlighted in this report.

This blog aims to highlight some of the ways that researchers working in the homelessness sector can build trust with research participants while minimizing burnout and mental fatigue. The burnout and mental fatigue experienced by researchers is often discussed differently than for practitioners working in the homeless-serving sector since researchers are usually not viewed as “frontline workers”.